Keeping in view the problems of cultural alienation, neglect of emotional wellbeing and bussing problems of children in their early years of education, many countries have embraced the home schooling system with licensed teachers, relevant curriculum and child-friendly methods of teaching.

Looking
at the recent incidents in private schools which treat children as
consumers and education as commodity, as well as the low quality of
education in government schools, many parents are looking forward to
home schooling linked to educational voucher system under the free
and compulsory elementary education provisions under Right to
Education Act.

In
Focus

Often,
home schools are small schools that have a complete curriculum
package and an attempt is made to accommodate child's learning
style for its transaction in the form of individual or group learning
in a set-up at a community place, child's home or teacher's home.

Many
of the teachers can be the mothers themselves who have trained in
home schooling. The management consists of the parents with a few
professionally competent co-opted members.

Along
with the traditional teaching methods a few non-traditional
approaches are used. Today, in many countries, the home schools
impart education from Kindergarten to the sixth standard for boys and
girls.

The
home
school
regards love, kindness and respect for children and supportive
relationships as a pre-condition to learning. The school is treated
as web of relationships and it makes a marked impression on young
minds.

The
home
school
respects each child as an individual and takes
great care in educating them and fostering their potential to learn.

In
India, one of the oldest home school is at Basavanagudi in Bangalore
which was started by Ms Robinson, a North American missionary. In
this school, they pay individual attention to each and every student.
The web posting says that the school, dedicated to the ideals of the
founder, has a concern for welfare of the children and helps them in
growing into successful individuals with well grounded personalities.

There
are several noteworthy points that the school takes pride in like
constituting managing committee comprising of parents and eminent
persons that subscribes for child-level planning in small school
setting with a teacher on every 20 to 30 students.

In
a home school, there all the cleaning and arranging work is done by
the children and teachers together.

In
Rajasthan, Shiksha Karmi Project had tried the concept on home
school
called Angan Pathshalas for small habitations. The experiment
revealed that the concept works well for primary grades where in a
single teacher teaches all the subjects at his or her home. However,
the project was not mainstreamed despite the promise it showed.

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